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| everyone just calls it game of thrones lololo |
PART ONE: AN OVERVIEW OF ICE AND FIRE
A Song of Ice and Fire wasn't a novel series most people outside of fantasy literature really heard about. It wasn't obscure by any means, but it wasn't exactly Harry Potter. It did successfully enough to get a television adaptation that ended up greatly expanding the fanbase and social outreach of the books by about a milliontrillioninfinitybillion, however. Its TV counterpart, Game of Thrones, set in motion a whole new era of people buying the books and then never reading them.
Today I want to talk about not a singular novel in the series, but the series as a whole. I wanted to examine the books themselves, their effect on culture and ultimately how they lead into their TV adaptation. Dozens of people have explored Song of Ice and Fire in great, great detail and there are many different essay papers written on the intricacies of Martin's storytelling and world building. This blog post will be kind of like that, just with swear words and less effort.
The first novel of the series, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. There are five books in the series so far and there are supposed to be two final installments coming: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Your dreams may as well be wind, though, because Martin probably isn't ever finishing them! Winds of Winter has been delayed for like two years now and Martin, reportedly, hasn't made too much headway in writing it ever since then. The man is very overweight and is turning 70 years old as of the year of writing this. He's wrapped up in other projects, not least of which is the Game of Thrones TV show. He doesn't write when he travels and the last few years all the guy has been doing is traveling.
What do you get when you add an obese geriatric with a high workload and frequent vacationing? I'll tell you what you DON'T get: a 450,000 word-long book!
Okay but this whole post isn't just meant to shit all over Martin. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that between his health, age, work position and the fact that his story is currently a giant mess, we're probably never going to see Martin himself finish his series. In a lot of ways this really sucks, because the man has spent like 30 years building and writing a world. In some ways, however, Martin has also spent the last 30 years destroying and pooping on his own world. But before we talk about how Martin screwed everything up, let's talk about how he screwed everything down.
THE BIRTH OF ICE AND FIRE
~or~
COPYING HISTORY: NO ONE WILL NOTICE BECAUSE NO ONE CARES ABOUT IRL HISTORY
It's not a shock to anyone that Martin "ripped off" a lot of real history when building his world. At this point everyone on planet Earth knows that almost everyone on planet Planetos has some form of real world historical counterpart. The war between the Lannisters and the Starks, for instance, heavily mirrors the real life War of the Roses, a war fought between the families of the Lancasters and the Yorks. I bet you can't guess which family inspired which family! However, Martin didn't copypaste from Wikipedia to create everything he came up with. Some of the lore is, in fact, original. So for this reason I put Martin's lore into two categories: Inspired By Real Life and Inspired By Imagination. These two categories will be important a little later on.
Martin put a lot of planning into his original concept for the story that would eventually become A Game of Thrones, the first installment to the series. Originally the story was meant to be 'fictional earth/history', but grounded entirely in realism. Westeros wasn't earth, but besides that there was no magic or scary dragons. However, during early drafts of the story, Martin was convinced by a friend to add dragons and other fantasy elements to the lore. The effects of this are pretty blatant and when you realize that fantasy got sort of "tacked on" to the world in the middle of its conception, you can really see where some of the series' big problems came from.
Martin set out to tell a story that had no clear 'good guy' or 'bad guy', a story where moral ambiguity and human complexity were what moved politics and events forward. In some ways he succeeded at this and yet in other, more ultimate ways, he totally failed. A Song of Ice and Fire was meant to be a sort of antithesis to The Lord of the Rings. Where Lord of the Rings was all about good vs. evil and the ultimate battle of good against bad, Song of Ice and Fire was supposed to be "people vs. people". I liked that about the series. At least, when the series was being about people vs. people and was not blatantly straying into "good vs. evil" territory. But more on this in a moment.
Martin has built and admittedly incredible world. Though he's borrowed heavily from real history in many ways, it's often very over-exaggerated as to how much he's taken (by fans and detractors alike). The amount of work Martin has put into fleshing out history and major cities is impressive and I consider it a valuable case study for anyone who is trying to build their own fantasy world. Well, mostly. At least. BUT, more on this in a moment.
Martin has built and admittedly incredible world. Though he's borrowed heavily from real history in many ways, it's often very over-exaggerated as to how much he's taken (by fans and detractors alike). The amount of work Martin has put into fleshing out history and major cities is impressive and I consider it a valuable case study for anyone who is trying to build their own fantasy world. Well, mostly. At least. BUT, more on this in a moment.
HOW TO TELL A STORY
~or~
HOW TO HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOUR STORY IS GOING AND THEN ENDING UP IN A CORNER
Martin doesn't plan out what he writes before he writes it. Normally this is okay and a lot of writers, myself included, only tend to vaguely plan out where we want our stories to go. From there, we just let the writing take us and see where we end up. This is okay when you're just writing a single normal length book. Martin tried to do it with a massive 1,000,000+ word long series. Did it work out very well?
EEHHHHhhhHHHhmmm, well. No. It didn't.
The series has five books but essentially there are only four. The current last two of the series, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons are actually one single book; only it was split into two, since if they were published together they'd have been an almost 2,000 page long book.
The first book of the whole series came out in 1996. The second took less than two and a half years and came out in early 1999. The third book came out in 2000. So far, so good.
The first book of the whole series came out in 1996. The second took less than two and a half years and came out in early 1999. The third book came out in 2000. So far, so good.
But then it took until 2005 to get the fourth book, A Feast for Crows. Okay, little blip there no big deal! Except it then took SIX MORE YEARS UNTIL A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. It took Martin, essentially, eleven years to write one installment of the series and it meant releasing half of a book with only a half of a story, and half of the characters, in 2005 and then not releasing the next half of that until 2011. Martin went from publishing the first three books in quick succession to taking half-a-decade each to get the latest two books out, and now it's been over seven years since the last book came out and Winds of Winter still has no clear release date and won't be coming in 2018.
What the fuck happened here?
Messy writing happened. When you compose a story, the beginning and the ending are always the easiest to come up with. The hero starts his journey in his humble village and ends his journey by sitting in a kingly throne. Points A and G are pretty easy to come up with. It's Points B, C, D, E and F that take a lot of work to get right. The middle 'bridge' of the story, for a lot of people, is always the hardest to write because it's where all the major points of the character and story arcs happen, so you have to have characters driving the story while touching on all of the important segments for each hero's personal journey as well as the journey itself. This is hard enough when you're writing a single story or a shorter book, but when you're writing a series as long and as convoluted as Ice and Fire, and you keep randomly inserting new story bits here and there that you have to attach to the rest of the story? Yeah. It's even harder than it sounds.
Martin doesn't closely plan out what he writes, he just writes and lets his imagination take him. For the first three novels this worked okay. Not very perfect, but it lead to readable material. By the fourth book, however, Martin was obviously starting to write himself into corners and hoooOOOooly hell does it ever show. The first three books are pretty coherent and make a lot of sense, their stories flow forward without much issue. Starting with A Feast for Crows, though, the books start to get really disjointed. Story threads keep getting created even though there's a mess of story threads that still need to be tied up, the world keeps getting bigger with no clear point to anything and characters keep getting introduced only to either contribute nothing to the plot or to make it even more messy.
Martin doesn't closely plan out what he writes, he just writes and lets his imagination take him. For the first three novels this worked okay. Not very perfect, but it lead to readable material. By the fourth book, however, Martin was obviously starting to write himself into corners and hoooOOOooly hell does it ever show. The first three books are pretty coherent and make a lot of sense, their stories flow forward without much issue. Starting with A Feast for Crows, though, the books start to get really disjointed. Story threads keep getting created even though there's a mess of story threads that still need to be tied up, the world keeps getting bigger with no clear point to anything and characters keep getting introduced only to either contribute nothing to the plot or to make it even more messy.
People originally looked at all of this and saw Martin as someone who was spinning a grand and unimaginably complex tale of historic proportions. Over time, though, it started to become clear that Martin didn't know what the hell he was doing. The editing started to get sloppier, long stretches of the books started to become irrelevant slogs and questions weren't being answered in ways that felt very good. For instance, people were upset when Lady Stoneheart (a reanimated zombie corpse of Catelyn Stark) was omitted from the TV adaptation, but what the fuck is Lady Stoneheart even doing in the books? Why is she there?! She's hanging Freys out of revenge for the Red Wedding, I get that, but where the fuck is Martin going with it? Where is Martin going with Dany and Mareen? The Dornish plot? Aegon and the invasion of Westeros? The fucking White Walkers?
He has two books to somehow bring everything to a close and I've always found it amusing when fans try to deconstruct all of Martin's writing and try to figure out what's going with all the possible theories and conspiracies and 'hints' they believe Martin is leaving, when in reality the answer is probably just: Martin doesn't have a big plan for any of this and most of the things that seem like they're clues to a greater purpose are actually just meaningless asides that don't mean anything. It can be hard to distinguish, when it comes to Martin, what random drops of information are actually clues to greater story threads that aren't yet revealed and what are just entirely pointless spur-of-the-moment-ideas.
A big issue Martin had when he wrote the single work that became the two novels A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons has been referred to 'the Meereense knot' (the name in reference to the city of Meereen from within the world of Ice and Fire). The Meereense knot is a grocery list of all the story issues Martin had when writing the book. This knot was basically what kept Martin from publishing Dance with Dragons for six god damn years, and by the end of Dance with Dragons the story is only even more fucking convoluted as it ramps up into the 'climatic buildup' phase of the series, where several different major battles are waiting to be held and huge storylines are about to commence. Martin 'worried' over this knot for eleven years but in the end his ability to control his story wasn't good enough and he's only kind of just made his problem worse.
Since the beginning of 2018 there has been on-again-off-again rumors that the next planned novel, Winds of Winter, may be split up into two books just so that something can get published sooner than later. Martin is vocally against this, probably because he's learned from the last two books what a headache and editing nightmare it is to split a book up like that.
Basically, Martin's issue is that the guy can't help himself. He inserts way too much random bullshit into his story instead of going down at least a vaguely planned out road. The first three books were very heavily synopsis'd out (at least by Martin standards) and the original story had a broad outline (which has recently been leaked to the world). Martin got off of a more pre-determined path with Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons and it shows. Seriously. If you go through and read the series for the first time, or perhaps reread them in the future, just seriously notice how much more concise and forward the first three books are. Then once you read the later two, notice how sporadic and almost senselessly the stories move and how random shit gets introduced more often.
CONFLICTING MORALITY IN EVERYTHING
He has two books to somehow bring everything to a close and I've always found it amusing when fans try to deconstruct all of Martin's writing and try to figure out what's going with all the possible theories and conspiracies and 'hints' they believe Martin is leaving, when in reality the answer is probably just: Martin doesn't have a big plan for any of this and most of the things that seem like they're clues to a greater purpose are actually just meaningless asides that don't mean anything. It can be hard to distinguish, when it comes to Martin, what random drops of information are actually clues to greater story threads that aren't yet revealed and what are just entirely pointless spur-of-the-moment-ideas.
A big issue Martin had when he wrote the single work that became the two novels A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons has been referred to 'the Meereense knot' (the name in reference to the city of Meereen from within the world of Ice and Fire). The Meereense knot is a grocery list of all the story issues Martin had when writing the book. This knot was basically what kept Martin from publishing Dance with Dragons for six god damn years, and by the end of Dance with Dragons the story is only even more fucking convoluted as it ramps up into the 'climatic buildup' phase of the series, where several different major battles are waiting to be held and huge storylines are about to commence. Martin 'worried' over this knot for eleven years but in the end his ability to control his story wasn't good enough and he's only kind of just made his problem worse.
Since the beginning of 2018 there has been on-again-off-again rumors that the next planned novel, Winds of Winter, may be split up into two books just so that something can get published sooner than later. Martin is vocally against this, probably because he's learned from the last two books what a headache and editing nightmare it is to split a book up like that.
Basically, Martin's issue is that the guy can't help himself. He inserts way too much random bullshit into his story instead of going down at least a vaguely planned out road. The first three books were very heavily synopsis'd out (at least by Martin standards) and the original story had a broad outline (which has recently been leaked to the world). Martin got off of a more pre-determined path with Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons and it shows. Seriously. If you go through and read the series for the first time, or perhaps reread them in the future, just seriously notice how much more concise and forward the first three books are. Then once you read the later two, notice how sporadic and almost senselessly the stories move and how random shit gets introduced more often.
CONFLICTING MORALITY IN EVERYTHING
~or~
MARTIN FAILED AT HIS MAIN OBJECTIVE
Martin had a single main idea in mind with his series, one that I touched on earlier in this post. It was essentially that there was no such thing as "good vs. evil" and every conflict as a good degree of moral ambiguity. War is never "good vs. evil", at least not wholly.
Too bad the White Walkers are literally evil.
Now at this point you might have punched your keyboard and shouted, "NO YOU DUMBFUCK!! THE WHITE WALKERS WERE CREATED BY THE CHILDREN OF THE FOREST TO FIGHT AGAINST THE FIRST MEN, IT'S NOT THEIR FAULTS!"
To that I say: It doesn't matter, the White Walkers are still entirely the bad guys. They're shallow. The Children of the Forest are shallow. The Night King is shallow. They're shallow. They're arguably even more shallow than Sauron was in The Lord of the Rings. You can't take a bad guy like the White Walkers, a literal "ice zombie demon that turns people into mindless slave zombies" character and then be all "ha! guess what you guys, they have a shallow reason for not being totally evil, or at least it's not their faults they're totally evil!". It's shallow. I dread every time the story brings up anything relating to the Children of the Forest or the White Walkers. The rest of the lore is so interesting and well built and fun to invest in. The proto-lore of the White Walkers is so fucking boring and half-developed and basically spits in the face of what Martin worked so hard to create with the rest of the story: Moral Ambiguity.
Remember when I told you that Martin tacked on fantastical elements to his story late in his development of it, and how it'd be very blatant and easy to spot once you knew that? Yeah well, here it is. Martin spent months, multiple years, developing all the kingdoms and the regions and people of the world. He tailored its existence and the way the history developed very closely to real-world standards; and it shows, because the 'human lore' in the story is excellent. I find myself getting lost in learning about it and studying it.
The 'magic lore' on the other hand? Garbage. Literally, it's basically garbage. It took all of ten minutes to come up with "Uhh, okay so there's these lil' green dudes, they're the children of the forest. They're like Tolkien elves only more boring and less creative. And uh see the First Men they fought with the children of the forest so the children of the forest made the white walkers. The white walkers make zombies and stuff, lol."
I summed up in five seconds the entire lore and purpose of the Children of the Forest and White Walkers. I could never do the same for the 'human lore'. For all of Martin's blustering about how different he was going to write his series and how there'd (in his own words) be 'no ultimate battle between good and evil', he seems to have made a gross fucking error. With the way the characters are starting to blab endlessly on about "the great war" and "the real enemy" and how fighting the white walkers has become the main righteous cause for any morally redeemable character, the only thing this god damn story is leading up to is a classic example of "ultimate good vs. evil".
CONCLUSION
Song of Ice and Fire is a mixed experience. It does a lot of things right while at the same time it does a lot of things wrong. Martin is a talented author but the man clearly bit off more than he could possibly chew. When your story is so large and as convoluted as Song of Ice and Fire, you really lose the ability to be casual about how you develop the story. Writing so much intertwining narrative without a clear outline is not something Martin is capable of doing it and it's very obvious the man either isn't able, or may not even be very willing, to try finishing his story. Look at how poorly the TV show is wrapping itself off, wantonly slashing storylines down to size and using sloppy writing to conveniently tie up loose ends: all of Dany's problems in Slaver's Bay are solved in moments, the army of the dead can conveniently be defeated by killing the white walkers, Bran can simply cheatcode his way into knowing almost everything (including the past) which results in Little Finger's whole grandscheme that the dude was building the ENTIRE SERIES becoming undone in literally a single scene. The story spent years building up this big, grand world and all of these complex issues, but now that the end is on the horizon, the writing is becoming inexcusably sloppy.
It really frames the whole issue pretty nicely. Martin has to work very hard to avoid doing what the show is doing, at least if he wants to give the story a satisfying and proper ending. Not only that, but Martin's own sloppy writing has put him into a place of tangled story threads and corners. In general the story is just a muddled god damned mess. Martin knows how his story ends, he provided a pretty intricate outline to the showrunners of the TV series so they'd know how to finish the show in case Martin either died or never finished the books in time. Some fans have already even worked out most of what is planned to happen, such as the nature of the Night King, the fate of a lot of the characters and how the story will end up concluding.
Martin might've known what Point A was and he might know what Point Z is. But he's stumbled, very hard, on every other Point in the alphabet. Personally I hold high doubts that the man is going to finish his series before he dies and these days that's starting to become a generally accepted opinion. Martin talks a lot about how he's a 'Garden' writer versus an 'Architect' writer; architects plan every detail out meticulously before they write, where as a gardener 'plants seeds' and sees how they grow.
That's a very poetic analogy, Mister Martin. It's too bad he gardened a giant, tangled vine that grew right up his asshole.
It really frames the whole issue pretty nicely. Martin has to work very hard to avoid doing what the show is doing, at least if he wants to give the story a satisfying and proper ending. Not only that, but Martin's own sloppy writing has put him into a place of tangled story threads and corners. In general the story is just a muddled god damned mess. Martin knows how his story ends, he provided a pretty intricate outline to the showrunners of the TV series so they'd know how to finish the show in case Martin either died or never finished the books in time. Some fans have already even worked out most of what is planned to happen, such as the nature of the Night King, the fate of a lot of the characters and how the story will end up concluding.
Martin might've known what Point A was and he might know what Point Z is. But he's stumbled, very hard, on every other Point in the alphabet. Personally I hold high doubts that the man is going to finish his series before he dies and these days that's starting to become a generally accepted opinion. Martin talks a lot about how he's a 'Garden' writer versus an 'Architect' writer; architects plan every detail out meticulously before they write, where as a gardener 'plants seeds' and sees how they grow.
That's a very poetic analogy, Mister Martin. It's too bad he gardened a giant, tangled vine that grew right up his asshole.
POINTLESS NUMERICAL LISTING:
1 out of 2
Next time I complain about the writing itself. Hopefully I'll write it within the next six years.
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